Motivating Design

After spending some time on TED.com I've been intrigued by the concepts and ideas of defining human motivation.

This video in particular by Dan Pink (embedded below, go watch it now.) he talks about motivation and how to get the most of your employees. In addition to being an excellent speaker, the topics he covers are very interesting to me and relate to game design.



He introduces The Candle Problem developed by Carl Duncker and the concept of Functual Fixedness, then introduces an incentive into the equation. The results are not what most people would expect. They found that when giving people a problem requiring creative thinking, any form of incentive produced negative results. Compared to the positive results of the same problem without incentives. While performance based on non-creative problems, incentives work great. This boils down to extrinsic motivators vs intrinsic motivators and their relations to creative vs routine work. The simple conclusion of the video and the experiments is that rewards narrows focus.

While the study, topic, or intent has nothing to do with gaming directly. I feel that the concepts can be applied, especially in the MMO world. Anytime a problem or a path is set in front of a player we, as designers, are asking them to provide us with a solution. We've given them the problem and we are asking them to resolve it. By no means is a player forced to resolve anything. It's a video game, the player can turn it off at any time, they have the option of just getting up and walking away. Of course, we don't want that. We want players to rise to the challenge and to enjoy the process, such is the art of design.

Now, with the perspective that we are giving the players problems to resolve, we have to next look into how we are going to incentivize the resolutions, which ties back into the statement on motivation. Many of the problems we assign to players are so minor that we often don't even realize we are asking something of them, or they don't realize that they are being given a choice. This is wonderful in most situations, as the purpose of a game isn't to 'bog us down with choices' but to 'enjoy an experience'. In order to help players to enjoy their experience, we need to correctly identify their motivations and try to mold those and control them into the desired pace and purpose.

Extrinsic motivation is the easy part. Taking in the lessons from Dan Pink, this type of motivation can actually increase results when it comes to non-creative problem solving. "Shoot the clown 100 times and get a reward" would be an example where an extrinsic motivator would give us drastically better results. This can be seen with grinding in the MMO world. With these mindless repetative tasks, giving us "shinies!" is an easy solution.

Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is much more difficult. Luckily, Mr. Pink again gives us some information that help us to build and nurture intrinsic motivation. He briefly touches on the topics of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose, as the three pillars of intrinsic motivation. In order to fully understand this, we're going to have to look at each one of these individually.

We'll start with Autonomy. This can be defined as being independent or self-governed, using the straight dictionary definition, anyone can argue that as a person they are Autonomous. Within the world of games though, characters are often designed to NOT be autonomous. This seems logical, as the social dynamic is one of the key draws to an MMO environment. So in the gaming world (or at least the MMO world) the question becomes "How do we build autonomy and still require social interaction?" The answer here is accountability. Even in a group, each character has to feel attached to their own roles. They have to feel autonomous within that role. I have to know that, as a healer, these are my responsibilities and I am accountable for those. Every person needs to feel that they are in charge of their own situation at all times. I have to know that I am capable of completing my task, and that every single tool needed is provided for me. Autonomy is one of the easier pillars to design for. Why? Because the game is typically designed around this without people actually thinking about it. Would you design a mechanic into a game that was impossible for a player? Surely not. The simple desire to not punish our players forces us to design with Autonomy in mind.

Pillar number two is Mastery. The ability to have expert knowledge or skill at your chose task. My peers have argued that the ability to achieve mastery is always present to all players and is something that's to be left fully in the players' hands and not something that we should design for. I disagree. I think that players should always feel that they have the tools and information to obtain mastery available to them. Due to be constantly surrounded by hardcore gamers (and being somewhat hardcore myself) the idea of going to a website for strategies or spreadsheets doesn't seem odd at all. While it's wonderful that the community has banded together to provide these resources to itself, it also limits these resources to a small number of players. In order to provide players a path to mastery, we have to give players access to information and a way to use that information. Practice makes perfect, we've all heard the age old saying, and it rings true now as much as ever. Players have to be given a way to practice, a way to develop mastery without breaking the immersion or flooding over into the real world. We have to facilitate and nurture growth if we ever want a player to obtain mastery. Information + implementation = mastery. You see a lot of this in fighting games, with full moves lists, practice modes, and challenges, all of which are designed to give players an avenue to explore and achieve mastery. While we can't force everyone to explore this route, more players will if the path is right there in front of them, rather than them having to go out and seek the path out first.

Purpose, the third pillar. Here's the kicker. A sense of purpose is often times a motivator on it's own. Purpose is the reason you are doing what you are doing. In games, this can be the story, the group, the raid, anything that connects us to something larger than our lonesome. Games have tried everything in the book to attach with the player, to give them a feeling of purpose. This is also such a unique niche from person to person. If you actually break it down, it seems a herculean task. How can I make a person really connect with pixels? This is heavily dependent on the audience you are appealing to. People who play fighting games religously probably don't need a lot of story to get them into the game. These players feed on competition, their purpose IS the mastery and using that mastery to triumph over another player. Compare this to your typical action adventure gamers, these players are often interested in the story itself. They want a main character that they can relate to, someone that they can see some semblance of themselves in. Taking this character (that they relate to) and going on fantastic adventures and completing impossible tasks gives them a sense of purpose because they feel intimately attached to their characters. Next we see social gamers. The people who play because all of their friends play. These people need to have the tools available to them to allow them to really connect with other players and to get their "social fix" from the game. Of course, the world isn't limited to these three classifications of players, what's important here is that we define who we are designing for, then we can flesh out the purpose and design with that in mind. If the purpose is meaningful to your players, they will embrace it lovingly.

Perseverance

I just want to share a link to a short story today : http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/522/entrylevel_video_game_.php

It's the story of an amateur designer who landed a design job right out of college. There's some good advice on page 3 for anyone who's interested in pursuing Game Design.

Perseverance is key.

Nash Equilibrium and the art of Yomi

I've been playing a lot of Fighting Games lately. See we have a Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter cabinet at work. A few people who work on my team here have been into this game for awhile and pushing me to try it out. Being a good gamer, I of course wanted to experience this game that I've never played before. This game isn't new, nor revolutionary by an means. It simply addresses the issues with previous games, and makes things a bit more flashy. It's an iterative game without a doubt, but it's a solid fighter and a good amount of fun to play with co-workers when you get a break. This progresses for a couple weeks of casual and fun play and me losing every single match against these Street Fighter adepts.

After a few weeks of playing, I decide that I'm tired of losing and that I'm going to start playing the game a bit more seriously. Of course, my muscle memory improved, and execution becomes easier and easier with practice. And things just started to make more sense. After a couple of months playing the same characters, with the same people, we've started to see the effects of a building Nash Equilibrium within our world of constants. (I say "starting to see the effects of", because the true act of achieving this equilibrium across the board at a single game could take years) Now, this is a very loose definition, technically, if we really wanted to get into it, we could say that choosing the same character every time was destroying the equilibrium, thus we are actually worlds away from it. While that could be a compelling argument and a great topic to converse on, it would draw this post out far, far too long to keep anyone's attention. (I fear it's already far, far too long as is)

Back on point! What the heck is Nash Equilibrium? Put as simply as I can, Nash Equilibrium is the state at which all parties involved are making the best possible choices, while taking into account the other players simultaneous decisions. It's when you know your opponent/teammate so well, that you know exactly what they are going to do. And they know what you are going to do. It's that level of teamwork you see that causes cooperative players to work together in perfect harmony without a peep to one another, or the two world champion tournament fighters who don't dare get overly aggressive because they know exactly what tricks the opponent has up their sleeves. When any two people are playing on the exact same level because they know the level of the opponent, the equilibrium kicks in. 

With competitive games like Fighters, the equilibrium is the factor that makes these matches less appealing to audiences. If you've ever seen any fighting game tournament footage, you've undoubtedly seen the "projectile fights" that happen. While these encounters aren't thrilling for the audience, being in that position knowing what you've got, and what they've got can be pretty tense. The equilibrium doesn't allow you to get flashy or risky, it keeps you grounded, safe, and smart. These concepts are something that need to be taken heavily into account when pursuing any form of competitive design. (Ha, you didn't think I'd loop this back into design huh?)

So how does this factor into other games? Let's take WoW for example (surprise!) Are players in these situations making decisions based on what other players are doing? Of course they are. Anywhere that decisions affect other people, and their decisions affect you, there's potential for this equilibrium to be achieved. These concepts can work in both directions, competitive play, and cooperative play. 

Keeping the equilibrium in minds, a major factor to consider in design is randomness. Developing a level of equilibrium when every ability has random properties can be very difficult. This effectively blows out the number of possible scenarios and makes attempting to predict what's next, and operate within those constraints, infinitely more difficult. This is designing against the equilibrium. But is this a better option than designing for the equilibrium? 

Depending on the type of play you are going for, these seemingly minor choice can result in major impact on the players. Let's look at cooperative play, it can be advantageous for a designer to favor and work towards players obtaining equilibrium. The simplest face value method of facilitating this is through total transparency of information. A player can't learn to work in harmony with others if one doesn't know what the other people are doing. You can see this first hand with the modding community in WoW. There are countless mods out there that help you keep dibs on what everyone is doing, especially in how it pertains to your specific role. Take damage meters for example, one of the most commonly used mods in the game. At surface value, this mod is simply a ranking system where people can say "Oh, I'm number 1". Moving beyond "damage done" functionality, this mod can help to create the equilibrium by giving players full disclosure about your fellow raiders. I know that I don't need to worry about debuff X because Player B always keeps it applied. This allows me to intelligently make a decision based Player B's decisions, thus letting me do more to maximize my role, and in turn help the whole; thus moving one step closer to equilibrium. Once each player is at the same level of equilibrium the group gains the ability to function simultaneously as a group and as an individual. Each and every player in an effective group must be fully and wholly confident in each and every member of the group. This equilibrium needs to be achievement to ensure consistent and effective victory. "He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks. " ~Sun Tzu - The Art of War.

Working against the equilibrium in cooperative play is, put simply, making it harder to work together. This is very rarely a favorable option, and is typically frustrating for players. Think about running a dungeon in WoW with a group, and not being able to see anyone else's heath/mana bars. Eventually, people would learn to operate within the bounds of the game. It would require massive amounts of practice, but in time people would develop "a feel" for how hard certain bosses hit, and they would learn to watch the game more intently to keep track of what's going on so they can react. This would drastically slow down Nash, but would it make the game more enjoyable? Would it make better players? Would players want to play it? I doubt all three of those questions. I think playing too heavily against Nash in cooperative play will result in player frustration, and a learning curve far too high for people to tolerate. Of course, I'm speaking in an MMO capacity. As there are many different types of games, fighting Nash could result in beautiful play in different genres.  

Now let's look at competitive play. In competitive play, I feel like this equilibrium can have a drastic effect on the fun and the "skill based nature" of these situations. The second one player fully understands another player, and is able to figure them out, the competition against the system is gone, leaving nothing but pure competition between two people. If I know exactly what you are capable of doing, then I have full ability to challenge that correctly. Providing you know the same amount of information about me, the equilibrium is in affect. While knowing the capabilities is great, know exactly what I will pick is called "Yomi" (The ability to predict, correctly, what an opponent will do). These two concepts work very heavily in tandem to produce a very high level of competitive play. It's much like chess, players are often told to "think 3 steps ahead." Looking at past chess champions, it's quite common to hear of players doing seemingly random or crazy moves just to throw their opponent off. To shatter the opponents yomi and keep their dominance on the other player. Once players are no longer playing against the system in any way, they enter equilibrium and yomi becomes the name of the game.

This is often addressed during game development by including a level of randomness into abilities/encounters/etc. Randomness allows player to prepare for some situations, but not all. Turning your Equilibrium into a branching tree of options, rather than a linear path. While Yomi comes heavily in to play in these situations, any unpredictable behaviour makes achiving equilibrium with your opponent infinitely more difficult. Things with "sometimes" or "occasionally" affects to them force players to keep guessing, rather than calculating. The objective here is to continually reset the equilibrium, thus not allowing play to get too predictable. This, of course, can be argued that play itself should be *totally* predictable and that the responsibility of maintaining or modifying the equilibrium is up to the players involved.

This ties back into the original question concerning competitive play. Do we design for or against Nash in these types of play? I feel it hinges heavily on your goal of competetive play. Is your goal to really give the players a medium where they are evenly matched and the game itself is simply a vessel to allow two players to engage in civil combat? Then you want to design for Nash and allow the players to play each other un-hindered in an environment free of randomness or unpredictable behavior. Or do you want players to be allowed to compete, but still be playing against the game simultaneously? Depending on the scenario, it must be defined if the players are playing against eachoter, or if they are simultaneously playing against the game as well.

Despite which type of play experience you are attempting to create, it's something to keep in mind. I think the art of it all is in defining what type of play are you really interested in creating. Both cooperative and competitive play can work for or against the equilibrium. Total transparency of play allows the player to build their equilibrium by careful observation and study of others, be it opponents or team mates. Inversely, the shrouding of information, can hinder the development of the equilibrium.